The Black Brute

Cretinetti attaccabrighe per amore (1911)

 
In November, a national spotlight fell on a grand jury hearing in which police officer Darren Wilson testified about his shooting of Michael Brown.  Commentators, including Slate's Jamelle Bouie and Vox's Lauren Williams, found that Wilson's statements recalled the "black brute" stereotype that originated during the Reconstruction era.  Wilson said, "He looked up at me, and had the most intense, aggressive face.  The only way I can describe it – it looks like a demon.  That’s how angry he looked."  Dr. David Pilgrim, a professor of sociology at Ferris State University, wrote, "The brute caricature portrays black men as innately savage, animalistic, destructive, and criminal. . . This brute is a fiend, a sociopath, an anti-social menace.  Black brutes are depicted as hideous, terrifying predators who target helpless victims, especially white women."  Historically significant was Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman, which later served as the basis for D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915).  In the book, Dixon described blacks as "half child, half animal, the sport of impulse, whim, and conceit. . . a being who, left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger."

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

 

It needs to be examined what myths and realities played a part in the public's perception of Michael Brown.

It was my contention in The Funny Parts that the black servants in silent film comedy were chiefly derived from the Commedia dell'arte servants and had only a tenuous association with the minstrel show stereotypes.  The Commedia dell'arte's Zanni servant was a statement on class divisions.  Wealthy nobles and merchants of Venice obtained their servants from the Lombard-Venetian countryside.  The men in these poor rustic areas were commonly named Gianni, the Venetian variant of which was Zanni.  So, a funny servant became a Zanni.  A black servant in a silent comedy film, whether he was called Snowball, Hambone or Possum, was a Zanni.

The minstrel show stereotypes were constructed and conveyed with a mean-spirited glee.  The objective of these depictions was, without question, disparagement and condemnation.  But malice is generally lacking in the way that black servants and black workman are portrayed in silent comedy films.  Traces of the minstrel show stereotypes turn up only occasionally.

Camouflage (1918)

Black men were almost never portrayed as brutes in silent film comedy.  The absence of the black brute is not surprising because the silly fellows who made these films were not trying to make a critical commentary on the modern black community.  Not that everyone would agree with my perspective.  Others have made the point that the black brute was too disturbing for popular entertainment.  They claim that the image of the docile black servant was more acceptable to white audiences, who liked to see a black man kept in his place.   

Comedian Larry Semon was unique in depicting black men as potentially violent.  Take a look at this scene from Semon's The Sportsman (1921).

Then, we have this scene from Semon's Her Boyfriend (1924).

A straight razor, which was cheap and easy to acquire, was a popular weapon in black ghettos.  Richard Pryor remembered his grandmother, Marie, keeping a straight razor in her bra.  The straight razor came to be known as a cut-throat razor because a robber could easily convince his victims to relinquish their valuables by pressing the cold blade against their throat.

Harlem godfather Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson, who once worked as a barber, was known to be adept with a straight razor.  This deadly implement figured prominently into a dramatization of Johnson's exploits featured in Hoodlum (1997).  At one point in the film, Johnson (Laurence Fishburne) directs one of his men to slice open a man's throat with a straight razor.  In the 1920s, the idea of a black man menacingly brandishing a straight razor was a source of anxiety for white people, who imagined walking down a street at night and a black man jumping out of the shadows to stab or cut them.  Stories of criminal acts by blacks were given prominence in newspapers and magazines of the day.  But this was never reflected in films except in rare instances.

Stull and Burns

A good example of the black brute stereotype could be found in a 1916 "Pokes and Jabbs" comedy Reckless Romeos.  Pokes (Walter Stull) and Jabbs (Bobby Burns) learn of a beautiful and mysterious actress named La Bella Edna (Edna Reynolds).  When they arrive at Edna's home, the actress greets them wearing a veil over her face.  Edna asks that one of the men accompany her to a cafe.  Pokes and Jabbs play a quick dice game to determine which of them should go with Edna.  Pokes wins.  As it turns out, Edna is playing a joke on the men.  She has darkened her face with greasepaint and, once she and Pokes have sat down for dinner, she removes her veil to reveal her dark complexion.  Pokes panics and flees from the cafe.  Jabbs, who has learned of the prank, arrives at the cafe and joins Edna for dinner.  Edna again removes her veil, but Jabbs knows better and acts as if nothing is wrong.  Suddenly, a big burly black man struts into the restaurant and demands that Edna accompany him.  Jabbs tries to interfere, but the black man knocks him out.  Edna races out of the cafe, but the black man chases after her.  The black man overtakes Edna at her home.  He tries to force himself on the frightened woman by threatening her with a straight razor.  When the woman begs for mercy, he grabs a towel and wipes greasepaint off his face, revealing himself to be Pokes.  This is Pokes' rather grim payback for the ruse that the actress played on him.

It is possible to find other examples of the black brute in early comedy films, but you have to be willing to take your time and look very hard.  A tramp (Fred Mace) is evicted from a wealthy widow's home by a burly black masseur in A Widow's Wiles (1912).  In Where is My Wife? (1921), Monty Banks panics because he assumes that a black man is pulling a knife on him.  The joke, as it turns out, is that the man is simply pulling out a handkerchief.

Take a glance at this still from a lost film, Zip and Zest (1919).  It looks as if a brutish black man is terrorizing comedy team Joe Rock and Earl Montgomery.  Was the black brute something to laugh about?

Black characters were not normally among the criminal class in either drama or comedy.  The criminals in films were Italians and Irish.  Low-budget independent films about Harlem gangsters were produced during the 1930s.  But these films, the most notable of which were Harlem After Midnight (1934), Dark Manhattan (1937) and Bargain with Bullets (1937), were distributed exclusively to black neighborhoods. 

The criminality of the minstrel show black was mostly limited to chicken theft.  This was occasionally the basis of a gag in silent films.

 Don't Park There (1924)

It could be argued that filmmakers expressed their anxiety of the black brute in an indirect way.  The inspiration of pulp magazines allowed filmmakers to move the action to distant and remote parts of the world, where they could replace switchblade and straight razor with spear and saber.  Black cannibals were eager to stab white castaways with finely sharpened spears.  An Indian maharajah or an Arab sheik, both dark in hue, conveyed unbridled glee as they swung sabers at white tourists.

A cannibal, which was buried beneath heavy paraphernalia, could be seen as more of an abstraction than an actual human being.

Washed Ashore (1922)

But it is undeniable that the legacy of the comic cannibal is offensive.

Cretinetti Hero (1909)

 Robinson Crusoe Ltd. (1921)

The idea of a knife-wielding black bogey man persisted for decades.  Redd Foxx once joked, "I carry a knife now because I read in a white magazine that all black people carry knives.  So I rushed out and bought me one."  In big cities like New York and Chicago, tension grew between black and white residents.  But, even then, the anger and anxiety that white people felt towards the black criminal was never expressed openly in films.  A violent outpouring of emotion did occur, however, when Chicago police captured black serial killer Robert Nixon in 1938.  The man was depicted in the press as a beast.  Chicago Tribune reporter Charles Leavelle wrote, "[C]ivilization has left Nixon practically untouched.  His hunched shoulders and long, sinewy arms that dangle almost to his knees; his out-thrust head and catlike tread all suggest the animal."

I should admit that I have deeply personal feelings on the subject.  I was mugged three times - twice in New York and once in Orlando.  All three times, the mugger was a black man.  Two of those times, the mugger threatened me with a knife.  The Orlando incident was the most frightening.  I rode into town on a Greyhound bus.  Because I knew that the station was in a bad part of town, I made sure to arrange my schedule so that I would arrive while it was still daylight.  But Greyhound buses are never on time and, as it turned out, my bus ran three hours late that day.  It was already night by the time that I got off the bus.  It had been a long day and I was exhausted.  I just wanted to get to my hotel room and go to sleep.  The area outside of the terminal was poorly lit.  I could see a cab parked several yards away and waved to the driver.  As I was walking to the cab, a black man stepped of the shadows and poked me in the stomach with a knife.  He demanded my wallet.  All I could think about at the moment was the fact that I had my cash, my credit cards and my hotel reservation in my wallet.  How could I give up my wallet?  I needed my wallet.  So, I hesitated, which got the robber mad.  I felt him press the blade harder into my stomach.  "Come on," he insisted, "give it to me."  But I still did nothing.  He looked surprised, maybe even frightened.  I am not trying to say that I was brave and I was standing up this lowlife.  It was just that I felt as if I was in a dream.  Every muscle in my body had become paralyzed.  Just then, the cab pulled up next to us.  I remember the cab driving up on the curb, but this is likely an embellishment that my mind has weaved into my memory.  The driver jumped out of the cab and grabbed me by the shoulders.  He glared at the man with the knife.  "Leave my passenger alone," he shouted.  The driver threw open the back door of his cab and unceremoniously shoved me inside.  We drove away and it was only then that the reality of the situation hit me.  I am convinced till this day that I might have died that night. 

Other people in my family have also been crime victims.  My son, Griffin, was home alone at the age of 14 when he became a victim to a home invasion.  His mother was at work.  His younger brother was at day care.  He was playing video games in his bedroom when four black teenage males forced their way into his home. 

The police acted quickly to round up the four teenagers involved in the crime.  Their ages ranged from 15 to 19.  The youngest one, Terence, had been bragging at his high school about the theft.  He was happy to confess when the police finally caught up to him.  He turned over the stolen items that he had in his possession and he gave the police the names of his accomplices. 

I later learned a few facts about Terence.  The boy's mother grew up in a middle class family, but she fell in with a young man from a less affluent part of town.  The young man got her into drugs.  She became pregnant with Terence as a result of their relationship.  For reasons that I don't know, the father was arrested and put into prison.  The mother's drug use got out of control and authorities turned Terence over to her parents.  Terence was able to make friends in his grandparents' neighborhood, but he preferred to spend time with friends and family from his old neighborhood.   I understand that one of his accomplices was a cousin. 

The two older teenagers from this group had extensive criminal records.  My son's mother talked to their probation officer.  The probation officer said that the 19-year-old of the group had the worst juvenile record that he had ever seen.  He had committed a long list of crimes, but he had never seen the inside of a prison.  This was because the crime occurred in Gainesville, the residents of which have a more liberal stance on juvenile crime than people in most other parts of Florida.  I talked to a victim's advocate at the prosecutor's office.  She expressed more compassion for the criminals than she expressed for my son.  She said that they do everything they can to make sure juvenile criminals finish high school.  She insisted that taking them out of school and putting them into prison will only turn them into career criminals. 

I earned a college degree in criminology.  I know all the theories and statistics about juvenile crime.  From what I've learned, you focus on reforming the ones that you can and you get the rest of them off the street.  The criminal justice system is limited in what it can do with criminals.  Rehabilitation would be the best outcome, but this is something that is rarely achieved through government intervention.  Seeing criminals serve long sentences in prison should create deterrence, but criminals don't worry about prison because they never believe that they're going to get caught.  There is a discomfort that many people feel to have punishment effected by the justice system.  It is the reason that we don't see public floggings.  It may seem to be inhumane for a man to gain satisfaction from inflicting pain on another man.  Responding to cruelty with cruelty is a self-defeating practice.  But prison is undoubtedly good at one thing - incapacitation.   Violent criminals need to be locked up so that they cannot continue to hurt others. 

The value of incapacitation is proven by an incident that occurred in Gainesville only a few months before my son's break in.  Alfred White, Jr., a black juvenile criminal on probation, made plans with his girlfriend to rob a convenience store.  The only person standing between them and the money was a 46-year-old woman behind the counter.  White needed to make sure that this woman didn't interfere with the robbery.  So what did he do?  He threw bleach into the woman's face, pushed her to the floor, and beat her senseless.  Then, finally, he grabbed money from the register and ran.  It was at first believed that the cashier had permanently lost her sight, but she managed in time to regain partial vision.  White had committed several crimes before his convenience store robbery.  He had an extensive criminal record.  Why was he allowed on the street?  Authorities wanted him to finish high school.  I agree that it doesn't benefit anyone to put juveniles in prison, where they can be mentored by older criminals.  But that's not the only option.  Other cities in Florida have programs that allow a juvenile criminal to live under strict supervision in a halfway house.  The people who run the halfway houses make sure that their residents continue their education and earn their high school diploma.  You don't have a chance to get a young criminal on the right path unless you get them away from their bad homes and their bad peers.

In college, I studied a wide variety of crime statistic reports.  No matter how you want to look at these statistics, the plain fact remains that black men create a disproportionate amount of crime.  Pick any type of report.  I remember having to analyze a report that mapped out a city's car theft incidents for a three-year period.  Low crime areas were green, moderate crime areas were yellow, and high crime areas were red.  The closer that a car was to a black neighborhood, the more likely it was to be robbed.  Black neighborhoods and nearby areas were red zones on the map. 

I had professors who had been criminal attorneys.   I had professors who had been police officers.  I heard a variety of stories.  Prosecutors in many jurisdictions will not pursue a case unless they know they can win it.  They are not frivolously throwing criminals in prison.  A former defense attorney told me that he had started out with great enthusiasm.  He was going to make sure that he kept the innocent defendant out of prison.  But he became cynical after doing this job for years.  His clients never bothered to hide their guilt from him.  Guilt or innocence wasn't the issue.  Justice wasn't the issue.  His clients always expressed the same concern: "My last attorney got me a good deal.  What kind of deal can you get for me?"

Of course, the impressions that I have on this subject go back years before my college education and the aforementioned crime incidents.  As a child, I lived in a white neighborhood and the subject of black people was not something my parents discussed.  But I saw black people on television.  Of course, I watched the old comedies.  I laughed at Dudley Dickerson acting scared and confused in Three Stooges comedies, but that clowning in no way diminished my opinion of black people.  How could it?  By then, Dickerson did not have to stand alone as the ambassador of black men.  The actor appeared on television alongside a wide range of black actors, including Sidney Poitier, Greg Morris, Ivan Dixon, Ossie Davis, Don Marshall, Brock Peters and Bill Cosby.  Morris played an electronics and forgery expert on Mission: Impossible.  Dixon played a communications expert on Hogan's Heroes.  Cosby played a witty secret agent on I Spy.  Poitier was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.  I admired Poitier when I saw him in The Heat of the Night, I felt sympathy for Poitier when I saw him in A Raisin in the Sun, and I had affection for Poitier when I saw him in Lilies of the Field. 

Forced busing brought black teenagers to my community in Bayside, Queens, in 1971.  That was the year that a group of black teenage girls threw my sister down a flight of stairs at her high school.  This was the first time that I got a close and sustained view of black people.  Groups of black teenage boys left school grounds contrary to school rules.  These teenagers went out of their way to act intimidating.  They never walked casually.  They always walked with a purposeful swagger.  They never talked calmly or quietly.  They laughed as loudly as they could and they shouted an unnerving stream of obscenities - "shit," "fuck," "motherfucker," and "damn." 

When I came home for lunch, my mother often sent me to Carl's Deli to buy groceries - usually milk, or bread, or cigarettes.  The deli, which made the best hero sandwiches in town, was always crowded at lunchtime.  I often begged my mother for the money to buy a hero, but she insisted that the heroes were expensive and we didn't have the money to afford them.  Several black teenage boys were often at the deli at lunchtime.  They would pull out large rolls of bills to pay for their heroes and sodas.  At the time, I knew that they came from poor neighborhoods and didn't understand how they could have so much money. 

Once they had their food, the teenagers sprawled out on the front porch of a nearby home.  The teenagers didn't bother to get the homeowner's permission.  They laughed, cursed, and tossed their bags and wrappings on the ground.  I knew the old woman who lived in one of the homes.  One day, the old woman came outside to confront the teenagers.  She told them that they could eat lunch on her porch as long as they cleaned up after themselves.  They agreed.  They were even polite about it, which made me think that they might not be so bad.

When I went to Bryant High School in Astoria, Queens, I saw black teenage boys get off the school buses in the morning and head straight for the school's basketball courts, where they would hang out and play basketball for the rest of the day.  The school administration did not do anything about this blatant truancy.  When we went outside for physical education, the coaches specifically instructed us not to wander over to the basketball courts.  Presumably, the school administration preferred to have this unwilling and uncooperative group segregated from the rest of the students.  They were contained like Indian warriors on a reservation.  Towards the end of my time at school, I heard that a number of homes in the area had been robbed by teenagers who had wandered off the basketball courts.  The young ladies who arrived on the same buses did attend class and, from what I saw, they had no problem securing a place in the school community.

I became emancipated from my parents when I was fifteen years old and I went to live with my older cousin Tom.  I went to school every day and I worked hard to get good grades.  I couldn't imagine how I would support myself without a high school diploma.  I never understood the reason that these other teenagers would turn down the opportunity for an education. 

I could go on and on with what I remember.  Let me share just one more memory that stands out.  My father was a fireman in Queens, but his company often had to travel to black neighborhoods in the Bronx due to chronic incidents of arson.  As the fire truck made its way through these neighborhoods, residents shouted at the firemen and threw bottles at them.  My father nearly died in one of these fires.  At the time, I thought that it would be better if my father let those neighborhoods burn.

We, as human beings, are products of our experiences.  How should I process these experiences?  What am I supposed to think?

Poitier's positive portrayals were suddenly undone by blaxploitation films, which promoted the image of black men as dangerous criminals.  I always found this odd since it was black filmmakers who had promoted these negative images.  In the 1980s, black actor Robert Townsend complained about white producers always wanting to cast him as pimps and junkies.  But it was black filmmakers who established these stereotypes. 

Beginning in the 1980s, gangsta rap celebrated illegal street gangs and the "gangsta" lifestyle.  Rap artists openly boasted of their associations with street gangs to give themselves a dark and edgy image.  The genre promoted murder, thievery, drug dealing, substance abuse, promiscuity and vandalism.  Black youth has been heavily influenced by gangsta rap.  The black teenagers who robbed my son were dressed in impeccable hip hop fashion.

Then, we have music artist John Legend.  When he accepted the Best Original Song Oscar for Selma, Legend said, "We know that right now the struggle for freedom and justice is real.  We live in the most incarcerated country in the world.  There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850."  It is deeply misguided to equate prison inmates to the Old South's plantation slaves.  Also present on stage was Legend's collaborator, Common, who once wrote a song to honor fugitive cop killer Assata Shakur.  Besides her conviction for murdering a police officer, Shakur was linked to a turnpike shootout, three armed robberies, a kidnapping, another murder, and an attempted murder.  As a crime victim, I regard it as deeply offensive for Legend to imply that every black man is in prison because of their skin color and not because of their victimization of other people.  I am even more offended by Common expressing his admiration for a cop killer.  What messages are being sent to the black youth of America?  I have great love and sympathy for children.  They deserve better guidance than this.

I know the arguments about profiling and stop-and-frisk.  I concede that these policing methods can be abused.  But the media has greatly exaggerated the problems in this area.  I knew a police officer who was involved in a stop-and-frisk operation.  It didn't require a sophisticated strategy to accomplish this job.  The police staked out a high crime neighborhood and they waited for young men to show up wearing gang colors.  For instance, a member of the Bloods gang could be expected to show up wearing a red bandana or a red cap.  I would describe this as shooting ducks in a barrel except that I think a duck trapped in a barrel presents more of a challenge.  It went even beyond gang colors.  This was years before the gang members wised up and made a fundamental effort to avoid detection.  At the time, a gang member might identity his gang affiliation by wearing a blue knit beanie, a baseball cap turned at an angle, or a plaid shirt (the color of the plaid depended on the gang).  Some gang members even went as far as wearing the gang's initials on their belt buckle or wearing a jacket with a gang symbol embroidered on the back.  Below is a member of the Los Solidos street gang showing off a tattoo of the gang's motto: "Laugh now, cry later."

 
They might as well wear a "Come and get me, cops!" tattoo across their forehead.  Would you board a plane with a man who has an ISIS tattoo?  You don't even need to look at a crime statistic report to know that gang activity occurs in the neighborhood.  A gang will brazenly mark their territory with graffiti. 

It is the chicken-or-egg dilemma.  Does a high conviction rate bring about targeting or does targeting bring about a high conviction rate?  I believe that the former is true.  In either case, criminals are being caught and convicted, which means that I can sleep better at night.

Profiling and stop-and-frisk policies aren't the real problems that need to be addressed in this situation.  Legend needs to speak out when a video like this is posted to the Internet. 

This man, Vincent Lavon Johnson, is in no way inhibited about punching a pregnant woman in the face during a robbery.  This is a man filled with a sense of righteousness.  Who has told him that he has a right to do this?  Hey, he's just living the thug life.  He's hardcore.  He's a badass.  What is more damaging to the image of black people - Dudley Dickerson or Vincent Lavon Johnson? 

Reality television producers populate their programs with people who fit ethnic stereotypes.  The Jersey Shore cast knew that they could get more screen time if they played up the guido stereotype.  But black people receive the worst treatment on reality television and, unfortunately, they do so as eager participants.  Ratings are earned by reality television stars who are willing to act foolishly.  In this way, reality television has become the new minstrel show. 

It helped Italians to gain acceptance that, in the 1950s, the country fell under the spell of many smooth and charming Italian singers, including Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Perry Como and Frankie Lane.  Little Wayne does not benefit the image of black people.

It would seem that Michael Brown was a product of a brute stereotype promoted freely in the media.

 
Empowerment is about opportunity and achievement.  It is not about making yourself physically intimidating.

 
Image is important in society.  If you want a good image, you have to be careful how you make yourself look to other people.  RapRehab columnist Lauren Carter wrote, "There is a lot we can’t control when it comes to racism and stereotypes.  But how we choose to portray ourselves through our art is something we can and should control, with the well-being of our people — and not personal wealth — as the end goal." 

The Time Travel Device Catalog

H. G. Wells' famous 1895 novel The Time Machine features a mechanized vehicle that allows the operator to travel to select designations in history.  The idea of a time machine was fairly new at the time.  Previously, fiction stories had characters transported through time by a supernatural being (a ghost in "A Christmas Carol," a demon in "Paris before Men," and a fairy in "Anno 7603").  In other stories, time travel occurred randomly and spontaneously.  A blow to the head suddenly transports a modern man back to 6th-Century England in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). 

Time travel devices first turned up in literature in the 1880s.  Edward Page Mitchell's 1881 novel "The Clock that Went Backward" involved a man who can travel back in time by winding an enchanted clock.  An intrepid inventor is transported through time by riding in an electric-powered airship in Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau's 1887 novel "El anacronópete."  The airship, as pictured below, is an enormous cast iron box.

Hollywood has been a great purveyor of time travel stories, but it took filmmakers a long time to introduce a time ship or time machine.  For many years, films relied on the blow-to-the-head premise to send characters back in time.  Lee Tracy took an especially severe blow in Turn Back the Clock (1933).  While drunkenly crossing a street, Tracy is struck by an automobile with ample force to throw him twenty years into the past.

Another early time travel film was Blondes Prefer Bonds (1931), a short comedy that starred Louise Fazenda.  It was a trend in the early 1930s for beauty specialists to claim they could turn back the years for clients with live cell therapy, monkey gland transplants, or cell rejuvenation treatment.  The film starts out with Fazenda seeking out an anti-aging treatment to regain her husband's affections.  Somehow (the script is vague on the details), the treatment sends Fazenda back to the days of her youth.

In Berkeley Square (1933), Leslie Howard just needs to step inside an ancestral home to travel back in time to the American Revolution.  In effect, the entire house acts as one enormous time machine.

Time travel devices have become popular in modern films.  These devices have taken on an outlandish array of forms in the last thirty years.  We've had a car (Back to the Future), a tunnel (The Time Tunnel), a hot tub (Hot Tub Time Machine), a phone booth (Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure), a police box (Doctor Who), a stopwatch (Voyagers!), a sled (TimeCop), a mirror (Mirror, Mirror), a dagger (Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time), a timepiece (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), a stealth fighter (The Philadelphia Experiment II), a closet (About Time), a mailbox (The Lake House), and a pod (Demolition Man and Forever Young).  And we have even more devices.  

A scepter allows the holder to travel through time in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993).

A group of adventurers are able to plunder historical treasures using a magical map in Time Bandits (1981).

This handheld Time-Converter permitted the user to open and close fissures in time in The Sarah Jane Adventures.

A frozen wheel - yes, I said a frozen wheel - could shift an entire island through time in the television series Lost (2008).

  
A toaster is used as a time travel device by Homer Simpson in a 1994 episode of The Simpsons ("Treehouse of Horror V").

 

Homer also had an idea for a time travel beach chair in a 1998 episode, "When You Dish Upon a Star."

It is surprising that the cosmic treadmill from The Flash comic book has never made it into a film.

It's Doesn't Make You as Bad Person to Dislike Dreadlocks

We interrupt this film blog for a serious message.  If you came here today for film criticism, film analysis or film history, I must report that my usual ongoing discussion of films has been suspended for a day.  It's not that this article is completely unrelated to films.  The following article will delve, in part, into the image that a Hollywood entertainer has to carefully design and maintain for their public appearances.  A prominent aspect of an entertainer's image is race.  But everything about race, including attitudes toward race and expressions of race, has gotten complicated and treacherous. 

We spend too much time and energy arguing about race.  No one with a bare amount of intelligence cares about a person's skin color.  At first, we mostly judge a person by the way they dress and the way they talk.  We evaluate, consciously and unconsciously, a person's various personal characteristics.  How do they carry themselves?  Do they listen to what I have to say or do they constantly talk over me?  When a long-term relationship develops, we do better to focus on the person's wit, honesty, dependability and compassion or their lack thereof.  Who cares about their skin color at this point?  I have seen diverse work groups easily adapt to working together.  Men and women having so many distinct qualities that are more interesting than skin color.  But we react differently to other races in a group context.  In general, self-interested people assembled in a political block are no longer people.  They are a snarling, yowling mob that wants to tear apart anyone who stands in their way.  The Internet has proven to be a dangerous outlet for this type of mob rule and mob hysteria.

Civilization demands that we assume a rational and measured approach to our differences.  Otherwise, we are surrendering to tribal impulses and behaving like savages.  It never fails to get ugly whenever tribalism kicks in.  Too many people feel compelled to assert their moral superiority with a furious display of primate chest-beating.  Conflict over the matter of racism has become the most convenient excuse for showing off in this way, but harm is caused by reckless and unfounded accusations of racism. 

When I was twelve years old, I was starting to get interested in girls.  One day, I was sitting with a group of friends.  I couldn't help but take notice of a girl who was visiting from another neighborhood.  I thought she was pretty and I wondered if a pretty girl like her could like a guy like me.  I was in the middle of saying something when the pretty girl sneered at me and asked why Italians always have to talk with their hands.  I felt humiliated.  For years, I always made sure when I was talking to keep my hands folded in my lap.  This was not the first time that I was mocked for my race and it was not the last. 

Many years later, co-workers would call me "Tony Soprano" and ask me if I had "whacked" anyone that week.  I admit that it irritated me more than it should have.  The recent PBS documentary series The Italian Americans aptly explored the struggle that Italians had assimilating into American life.  The biggest obstacle to the Italians' assimilation was the unfavorable prejudices that many held towards them.  So, no, I don't like racism.  But, today, the definition of racism has been expanded to an irrational, unworkable and harmful degree. 

People who work together in a social group cannot afford to be overly sensitive.  We need to be more accepting and understanding of other person's opinions and perspectives.  We need to accept some amount of racial tension as reasonable and inevitable.  We shouldn't attack every unfavorable race-related comment like Gallagher attacking a watermelon.

For the vast majority of people, racial tensions do not relate to skin color.  They relate to cultural differences.  We all have different tastes and values based on our culture.  How could that not create tension? 

Yes, Italians use their hands when they talk.  They regard this as an expressive and passionate way to communicate.  This is a cultural preference.  People of other races might believe that a person talking with their hands is unreserved and unmannered.  That's fine, too.  You don't have to like a person gesturing while they talk, but you need to tolerate it.  It's not as if it's doing you any harm.

We learned from a recent episode of Fashion Police that Giuliana Rancic is repulsed by dreadlocks.  Rancic was reviewing photos of Hollywood stars on the Oscars red carpet when she came upon a photo of Zendaya Coleman, a star of the Disney sitcom Shake It Up.

As you can see, the young black actress arrived at the Oscars with her hair arranged in artfully braided dreadlocks.  Rancic joked that she could imagine the actress smelling of patchouli oil and marijuana.  A lengthy post on Coleman's Twitter account slammed Rancic for the comment.  This set off a three-day firestorm.  The rabid Internet community could not have been more incensed if Rancic had called the actress "Brillo head."  It was an overreaction that is made even worse by the fact that these same people tend to overreact about something new every day.  Not surprisingly, the interpretations of Rancic's comment went in an extreme direction.  Some said that Rancic was saying that straight, silky Caucasian hair was superior to black people's rougher, curly hair.  Some accused Rancic of saying the black people's hair was dirty. 

I want to first say that attacking a hair style is vastly different than attacking a hair type.  The former relates to culture and the latter relates to race.  You don't have to like a black person's hair.  But, if you find a black person's hair to be too rough and kinky to your liking, you should probably keep it to yourself.  In either case, I don't know if the same sensitivity should be applied to dreadlocks.  Dreadlocks is an exotic and archaic hairstyle that is rightfully associated with patchouli oil and weed.  I am not sure Rancic's comment (which, for the record, was scripted by a staff writer) represents an all-out attack on black people.  As far as I know, a small minority of black people have ever had dreadlocks or have known anyone who has ever had dreadlocks. 

It later came out that the way that the show was edited took the comment out of context.  Rancic was trying to make the point that the hairstyle didn't suit Coleman, who had looked much better in the past with less radical and more high fashion hairstyles.  Rancic said in her defense that, at this point in time, the dreadlocks style is a bohemian statement that has nothing to do with race.   

Coleman may have had her own reason to feel outraged by the remark.  The actress, who has a black father and a white mother, may feel that her racial identity has become a distraction in her career.  She was accused of being too white when she was cast to play black singer Aaliyah in a biopic.  She was quickly replaced in the role by another actress, although she insisted that she dropped out of the project due to scheduling issues.  She wore dreadlocks to honor her black heritage (her father has worn dreadlocks for years), but she was caught off guard by this unexpected attack by Rancic.  Rancic indicated that the actress has a delicate frame and delicate features and the dreadlocks were, in contrast, "really heavy."  "It overwhelms her," Rancic said.  Was Rancic making a point that the hairstyle was too black for the light-skinned actress?  Or it could be that I, too, am overthinking this matter.

These issues, admittedly, can get complicated.   The Shaiva Nagas, ascetics of South Asia, once rubbed cow dung into their dreadlocks as part of a sacred ritual.  Should everyone have to tolerate dung-coated hair?  I wonder if Rancic would have gotten into trouble if she simply said that she imagined Coleman smelled like patchouli oil, which I understand has a nice scent.  Was it the weed reference that made it offensive?  Most of the people who attended the Oscars that night probably have smoked weed and think that weed is a good thing. 

In any case, let us not give too much importance to these dreadlocks, which were a simple fashion choice that Coleman had made for the evening.  The actress has been known to adopt eye-catching hairstyles for awards ceremonies.

Coleman showing up at an awards show with dreadlocks is no more significant than Miley Cyrus showing up at an awards show with blue hair.  It was meant to get the actress attention and it was not guaranteed that all of that attention would be positive.  It was not as if Rancic said that Coleman had an ugly nose or fat legs.  It was just an arrangement of hair.  For the record, Coleman was back to her normal hairstyle the next day.  Reports came out later that the dreadlocks had been fake hair extensions.  Blogger Sandra Rose wrote, "As a British woman born to Jamaican parents I agree that the remarks were offensive.  But even more offensive is Zendaya walking around wearing FAKE dreadlocks and then having the nerve to act insulted when white people call her out for being phony."  That's the problem about setting off a bomb, you can't always control who or what gets damaged in the blast.  Coleman was soon tired of answering questions on the subject.  She told an interviewer, "It's over. . . Let's let it go." 

I strongly suspect that Coleman's message on Twitter was written by a management representative.  If this is the case, I think that the writer who scripted Rancic's upsetting joke and the writer of Coleman's Twitter denunciation should meet face-to-face and get all of this controversy hashed out.

Don't get me wrong, I abhor the casual rudeness of Fashion Police and I would be happy if they took this show off the air, but this dreadlocks business was blown way out of proportion.  Racism is the belief that you have the right to segregate, dominate or oppress people of another race because you believe that your own race is biologically superior.  I don't know if a person saying they dislike dreadlocks meets the standards for racism.  An alternate definition of racism is a person expressing hatred or intolerance of other races.  That definition is too broad for my tastes.  You can go so far in your interpretation of racism that you become intolerant of another person's views and preferences. 

It would be great if we could feel nothing but love for one another, but man evolved in dangerously competitive environments and he was only able to survive by looking after himself and the others in his group.  The Walking Dead appeals to a large television audience because it taps into our time-tested group loyalties and our primal kill-or-be-killed instincts.  The series strips away the burdens and pretensions of civilized behavior and allows its characters to fiercely indulge their natural survival instincts.  Everyone outside of the group is the Other and poses a threat to their existence.  Nowadays, political party affiliations allow people to convert primitive hostilities to a socially acceptable form.  We can, in this way, see ourselves as part of a group and feel justified to attack everyone outside of that group.  If you are not part of our group, then you must be an enemy and we can destroy you.

 
What is the Other?  The Other is the Other.  Skin color provides a distinct marker but it is otherwise irrelevant.  I can't tell the difference between Danish people and Swedish people, but these two groups have been bickering for 900 years.

These are young Swedish ladies.

This is a young Danish lady.

Can you tell the difference?

But here is a list of the wars in which the two countries fought against each other:

The Dano-Swedish War (1470–1471) 
The Dano-Swedish War (1501–1512) 
The Swedish War of Secession (1521–1523) 
The Northern Seven Years' War (1563–1570) 
The Kalmar War (1611–1613) 
The Torstenson War (1643–1645)
The Second Northern War/Dano-Swedish War (1657-1660)
The Scanian War (1675–79) 
The Great Northern War (1700–21) 
The Theater War/Russo-Swedish War (1788–1789)
The Dano–Swedish War/Napoleonic War (1808–1809) 
The Dano-Swedish War/War of the Sixth Coalition (1813-1814)

War, in one form or another, is the nature of man.

Too many comments on the Internet manage to, as the headlines often say, "spark outrage."  It bothers me the most that this indignation never feels real.  It comes across as something else - maybe misplaced anger or maybe stress relief.  Rage can release built-up anger from past traumas.  A distressed person can make themselves feel better by inflicting their frustrations on others.  Rage increases the body's adrenal output, which dulls sensations of pain.

Let us return to the Oscars red carpet.  I find it odd that the Internet's many politically correct young commentators adamantly oppose potentially racist comments but think nothing of expressing unbridled hatred of their elders.  Every year, they complain bitterly about the many old people who attend the Oscars.  Andrew O'Hehir of Salon has spoke of "the creaky, crusty demographics of the Academy."  O'Hehir and others would ban this group from the show and the Academy if they had the power.  Ageist young people will not hesitate to say that an old person smells bad.  They don't say that they smell of patchouli oil and weed.  They say, bluntly, that they smell bad.  They don't really believe in treating everyone fairly.  Their message is simple: Screw old people.

But ageism is just as bad as racism.  The most terrible form of racism occurs when a person is denied a job or denied housing simply on the basis of their skin color.  But how many of these young people would deny a person a job based on the wrinkly texture of their skin or refuse to rent an old person an apartment because they assume that the person would make the apartment smell of Ben-Gay?  It is upsetting to see hatred between generations.  Hate is hate, but it is particularly disturbing to see hostility between a father and son.  This type of family infighting is nasty and perverse.  So, why is ageism socially acceptable and racism is not?  This makes political correctness too arbitrary to be taken seriously.

I talked to an old man the other day.  He said that he stopped watching football because he is repulsed by, in his words, "the long hair."  I didn't ask him to elaborate, but I can assume that he thinks that long hair looks ugly and maybe even dirty.  You know, it doesn't look too good to me, either.  That doesn't make me a bad person.  If I say that I prefer the old-fashioned, clean-cut football players, it doesn't mean that I prefer old-fashioned, white football players.

I am not a person who ever speaks in code.  I have a right to my personal taste in regards to hairstyles.  But who am I kidding talking about my preference in football players?  I could never relate to football.  A game more to my tastes is Trivial Pursuit.   

I want to end this article with a small bit of advice.  Excuse me if I come across as Woodsy Owl dispensing a public service message.  But my message is simple and it could be helpful.  If you think that someone has made a racist comment, hold your breath and count to ten.  Once you feel calmer, take the time to carefully consider the nature of the comment.  Do not erupt in protest unless you are sure that the comment is racist and it poses some sort of threat.  Our survival as a society depends on our ability to talk openly and calmly about our feelings and impressions on issues of race.    

I will talk about my personal feelings and impressions on race in the next installment of this article.

The Mystery of the King of Kinema

I am proud to have been interviewed for this film. I am even prouder to say that I lost a great deal of weight since the interview. So, don't be too distracted by my big belly.

Getting Everyone into The Frame

Publishers prefer to feature a photograph on the cover of a film book.  It isn't an unreasonable idea.  After all, film history is mostly about images.  Dramatic tableaus and photogenic faces leave a strong impression on film fans.  An actor's friendly smile can be an attractive welcome to prospective readers. 

But I wanted something different for my book Eighteen Comedians of Silent Film.  I wanted to have an illustration on the cover.  At first, I had something like this group portrait in mind. 

This is the work of the incomparable Drew Friedman.  But this illustration features seven comedians.  My book, as the title indicates, celebrated a diverse group of eighteen comedians.  It would be a tall order to squeeze another eleven comedians into the limited frame of a book cover.  A book cover offers much less space than a wall mural or a magazine centerfold, both of which have been known to support large group portraits.  A pioneer of the Hollywood caricature was Miguel Covarrubias, who made this famous group portrait for a Vanity Fair spread. 

John Decker created this mural for the Wilshire Bowl Restaurant in 1941.   

How about a mob of Jerry Lewis?  Sam Norkin painted this mural for Brown's Hotel & Country Club in Loch Sheldrake, New York.

Bob Harman's Hollywood Panorama, which was five-feet wide and nine-feet tall, featured more than a thousand caricatures of classic film stars.  That's more than a thousand character designs!  Harman created this ambitious work in a span of ten years.  This is just one of many panels from the panorama. 

Sorry, I needed something far less ambitious than this.  A man's reach does sometimes exceed his grasp.  Besides, it was ludicrous to dream of a Drew Friedman cover on a stick figure budget.  But, then, maybe stick figure representations of the comedians was not a bad idea.  I worked with an illustrator named Henly Sukandra to develop this cover.

I have always enjoyed caricatures of celebrities.  During my childhood, celebrity caricatures were everywhere.  They could be found in comic books.   

Mad magazine delighted readers with caricatures from the amazingly talented Jack Davis and Mort Drucker.  Davis would have had no problem crowding eighteen comedians onto a book cover.  No better proof can be provided than the poster art that Davis provided for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which is the illustrator's single most popular work. 

His covers for TV Guide never failed to boost the magazine's circulation.  I, myself, made a point to save every TV Guide issue adorned with a Davis cover.

 
Illustrations do more than excite interest in a film or book.  Illustrations excite the imagination.   Seeing a Davis poster outside of a theater could draw me into the fantasy of a film before I had even seen the first frame.

Here is a celebrity gathering created by Drucker.

I am not the only film book author who prefers to use an illustration instead of a photo.  Take, for instance, the writers who recently put together this book about the Thin Man film series.

They could have easily used the photo on which the illustration was based.

Or they could have used this welcoming portrait.

But they chose an original illustration.  I have to say that it got my attention and I did, as it turned out, purchase the book.

It fascinates me that the art of caricature can be accomplished in so many different ways.  Let us examine the many ways that illustrators have drawn Laurel and Hardy.

Al Hirschfeld

Robert Grossman

Achille Superbi

Sebastian Krüger

I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge other caricaturists that I admire.

Jack Benny by Bruce Stark

Frank Sinatra by Edward Sorel

 

Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca by John Johns

James Montgomery Flagg, 1935

Now, let me talk about caricatures that I don't like.  This level of distortion and exaggeration is unappealing to me. 
 

Today, this type of caricature has become commonplace due to Photoshop, which allows users to grossly manipulate photos of actors. 

Using Photoshop to enlarge an actor's ears, inflate their nose or stretch out their chin may make the image surreal and silly, but it does nothing to convey the personality of the subject.  That takes the very specialized skill of a free-hand caricaturist.  Compare a portrait of Carol Burnett created by John Johns to a similar portrait created by a Photoshop artist.

I could never get the idea of a group caricature out of my head.  I got the idea to promote my upcoming book, I Won't Grow Up!, with illustrations of famous comedians dressed as children.  I hired an illustrator to create three separate character illustrations and a fourth illustration that combined the characters into a single image.  The finished montage features a rattle-shaking Seth Rogen strapped into a high chair, a mischievous Jerry Lewis yanking on a cat's tail, and a genial Lou Costello riding through the frame on a tricycle.  But this trio looks thin compared to the teeming group portraits of the past.  I can't stop imagining a slew of comedians dressed in kiddie attire tearing apart a day care center.  I hope that, when my budget allows, I can work with an illustrator to make this image happen.